AAVE - West Indian English Creole, African American Vernacular English, and Irish American Vernacular English.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Black English, Black Vernacular, or Black English Vernacular (BEV), is a type variety (dialect, ethnolect and sociolect) of the American English language. It is known colloquially as Ebonics ("ebony" and "phonics"). With pronunciation that in some respects is common to that of Southern American English, the variety is spoken by many blacks in the United States and ethnic minorities worldwide. AAVE shares many characteristics with various Creole English dialects spoken by blacks in much of the world. AAVE also has grammatical origins in, and pronunciation characteristics in common with, various West African languages.

Any language used by isolated groups of people is likely to split into various dialects. The pronunciation of AAVE is based in large part on Southern American English, an influence that no doubt was reciprocal in many ways. The traits of AAVE that separate it from Standard American English (SAE) include:

grammatical structures traceable to West African languages;

changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, many of which are found in creoles and dialects of other populations of West African descent (but which also emerge in English dialects uninfluenced by West African languages, such as Newfoundland English);

AAVE's resistance to assimilation into Southern American English or other more standard dialects is a natural consequence of cultural differences between blacks and whites. Language becomes a means of self-differentiation that helps forge group identity, solidarity and pride. AAVE has survived and thrived through the centuries also as a result of various degrees of isolation from Southern American English and Standard American English—through both self-segregation from and marginalization by mainstream society.

Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectal, since they use Standard American English to varying degrees as well as AAVE. Generally speaking, the degree of exclusive use of AAVE decreases with the rise in socioeconomic status, although almost all speakers of AAVE at all socioeconomic levels readily understand Standard American English. Most blacks, regardless of socioeconomic status, educational background, or geographic region, use some form of AAVE to various degrees in informal and intra-ethnic communication (this selection of variety according to social context is called code switching).

Other AAVE grammatical characteristics

Some of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English.

Linguist
William Labov

William Labov really did establish a whole new academic field when he was a graduate student. And he has remained at the forefront of that field to this day. Matthew Gordon describes how, why, when and where this happened, and explains with great clarity the importance and excitement of it all. It's a remarkable story, and Gordon has really done it justice. Peter Trudgill, University of Agder, Norway Gordon has written a mesmerizing narrative of one of the greatest linguists in the history of the profession, capturing the historical, social, and theoretical significance of Labov's pioneering studies of language in its social context. It is an invaluable, timeless contribution to understanding the modern development of our discipline.
Gordon paints a contextually rich picture of William Labov's scholarship. Gordon provides extensive explanation of Labov's many milestones from the 1960s to 2010 and also contextualizes the development of linguistic and sociolinguistic fields over this time.

5-06-2012 William Labov has been awarded a doctorate honoris causa
William Labov with with the medal of doctor honoris causaWilliam Labov, professor of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), has been made doctor honoris causa by UPF today, 5 June, at an academic ceremony presided over by rector Josep Joan Moreso. The ceremony took place this lunchtime at the auditorium of the Poblenou campus, hosting such an event for the first time was full-to-overflowing.ACCEPTANCE SPEECH BY WILLIAM LABOV
FOR THE DOCTOR HONORIS CAUSA DEGREE

Linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.

Perhaps most strikingly, the copula is often dropped, as in Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Arabic. For example: You crazy! ("You are crazy") or She my sister ("She is my sister"). The phenomenon is also observed in questions: Who you? ("Who are you?") and Where you at? ("Where are you?"). As in Russian and Arabic, the copula is omitted only in the present tense, and is usually specified in the past tense (with some exceptions. For example: Where she go? ("Where did she go?"))

Present-tense verbs are uninflected for person: there is no -s ending in the present tense third person singular. Example: She write poetry ("She writes poetry")

There is no -s ending indicating possession—the genitive relies on adjacency. This is similar to many creoles throughout the Caribbean. Many languages forms through the world use an unmarked possessive; it may, here, result from a simplification of grammatical structures and tendency to eschew particle usage.

In July 2005, Mary Texeira, a sociology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, suggested that Ebonics be included in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Though she had no standing in the school district, the recommendation was met with a backlash similar to that in Oakland nine years before.

EXPERT DR. JOHN RICKFORD More generally, reduction of vocally homogeneous final consonant clusters. That is, test becomes tes (they are both voiceless), hand becomes han (they are both voiced), but pant is unchanged, as it contains both a voiced and an voiceless consonant in the cluster.

Negation

In addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:

Use of ain't as a general negative indicator. It is used in place of "am not", "isn't", and "aren't" or even "didn't".

Lexical features

For the most part, AAVE uses the lexicon of SAE, particularly informal and southern dialects. There are some notable differences, however. It has been suggested that some of this vocabulary has its origin in West African languages, but etymology is often difficult to trace and without a trail of recorded usage the suggestions below cannot be considered proven.

Proponents of various bills across the U.S., notably a resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1996, wanted "Ebonics" officially recognized as a language or dialect. At its last meeting, the outgoing Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board, who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education-related issues.

The Oakland resolution declared that Ebonics was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of black children belonged to "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems". This claim was quickly ruled inconsistent with current linguistic theory, that AAVE is a dialect of English and thus of Indo-European origin. Furthermore, the differences between modern AAVE and Standard English are nowhere near as great as those between French and the Haitian Creole language, the latter of which is considered a separate language. The statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread incredulity and hostility. Supporters of the resolution later stated that "genetically" was not a racist term but a linguistic one. Languages are chunked into families, so you can talk about them in this way then follow how they change in time into the next generation and follow what they become in time - that is what is meant by genetically based.

AAVE as a Creole

Dillard (1972) quotes slave ship Captain William Smith:

As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side of the River, cannot understand each other.… [T]he safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side of the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel

Some slave owners preferred slaves from a particular tribe. For consigned cargoes, language mixing aboard ship was sometimes minimal. There is evidence that many enslaved Africans continued to use fairly intact native languages until almost 1700, when Wolof became one of the bases of a sort of intermediary pidgin among Africans. It is Wolof that comes to the fore in tracing the African roots of AAVE.
By 1715, this African pidgin had made its way into novels by Daniel Defoe, in particular, The Life of Colonel Jacque. Cotton Mather claimed to have been very familiar with his slaves' speech, knowing enough to affirm that one of his slaves was from the Coromantee tribe. Mather's imitative writing shows features present in many creoles and even in modern day AAVE.

Anansi, Tekoma, and the Cow's Belly Folktale EXCELLENT RESOURCE YOU MUST SEE!!Anansi stories are culturally rooted in West Africa. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, many West African people were carried to the United States Virgin Islands. Their Caribbean lives were in many ways different from their African lives. Still they told stories, as they had in Africa, for entertainment and to teach lessons about life. The Virgin Islands Dutch Creole folktale spoken by Dr. Robin Sabino called Anansi, Tekoma, and the Cow's Belly was collected by a Dutch anthropologist, J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong, who visited the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1923. De Josselin de Jong does not say who told him this story. However, we do know that all of the people who told him stories lived on St. Thomas and St. John and that they spoke both Dutch Creole and AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS CREOLE.

THE VOICES OF LIVING HISTORY BY DAVID SUTCLIFF After emancipation, some freed slaves traveled to West Africa, taking their creole with them. In certain African tribal groups, such as those in east Cameroon, there are varieties of Black English that show strong resemblances to the creole dialects in the U.S. documented during this period. Read Pidgins and Creoles and other Stigmatized Varieties by David Sutcliff. The languages have remained similar due to the homogeneity within tribal groups, and so can act as windows into a past state of Creole English.

HISTORY AND MYTH MAKING

Pedantic Scholarship
Education is compartmentalized, and social studies which should be able to - doesn't deliver the big picture. We use the net to interrupt the state sanctioned text books who have bought the right to have publishers print the myths that they want to you to believe but do not really explain what happened. We interrupt the education text book and Dictionary industry supply chain.

Proponents of Ebonics instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The belief underlying it is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms.
For black students whose primary dialect was Ebonics, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language [sic]... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the "errors" in standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead features of a grammatically distinct form of English. Rather than teaching standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach standard English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to standard American English. Framers of the Oakland resolution recognized that, when teaching anyone a language or variety with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation (this consideration appears in later discussion, not in the resolution itself). For instance, if a child reads "He passed by both of them" as "he pass by bowf uh dem", a teacher must determine whether the child is saying passed or pass, since they are identical in AAVE phonology. Appropriate remedial strategies here would be different from effective strategies for an SAE speaker who read "passed" as "pass".

If you are using MLA citing, here is an example using the "Educational CyberPlayGround" site.Cassidy, Dan and Ellis, Karen: "Educational CyberPlayGround" Internet.
Database available online. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com.
Date accessed Month day, year.

The First War on Terror:
Until the United States won its independence from Britain, the country was covered under the British treaties with the Barbary rulers. After 1783, however, America no longer had that safety net. They either had to pay like everyone else, cease trading in the Mediterranean, or run the risk of falling prey to Corsairs. Americans, particularly Thomas Jefferson, came up with an alternative--build a navy and fight.

In one of my favorite books: "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" Pirsig says. . . . .
"We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too . . .

SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING
BELIVING IS SEEING."

FACT:

Understanding is best achieved when aspects of reality are studied in isolation from each other (biology, history, physics, language, etc.).

CONTRADICTORY FACT:

Understanding is best achieved when the holistic nature of reality is recognized so that all knowledge becomes part of a single, mutually supportive conceptual framework.

References

Dillard, J. L. (1972). Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. Random House. ISBN 0-394-71872-0.